Saturday, November 19, 2011

Cloud Foundry has many authors, most notably Collison, known for building the TIBCO Rendezvous messaging system that sped data across Wall Street’s machines in the ’90s. But you might describe Cloud Foundry as a culmination of Lucovsky’s career: It takes the idea of a widely used software platform like Windows NT and applies it to the sort of sweeping infrastructure Google erected to run its massively popular web services. But then it goes further. After building the platform, Lucovksy and Collison convinced Maritz and company to open source it, letting others have it for no charge. In the words of Maritz, VMware seeks to provide “the 21st-century equivalent of Linux.”